The Stop Online Piracy Act is the most important bill to be pushed through Congress yet, and it is just more proof that our government is willing to sign away more and more of our liberties to please their elite corporate masters. Indefinite detainment was one step in the direction of totalitarianism in America. Time for the next step. Its time for us to wake up before we lose our voice.

Brief summary: Websites suspected of illegally hosting copyrighted material will be blacklisted at the request of the copyright holder based on DNS.

The terms are purposely vague so that entire websites can be shut down and competition can be silenced. I hope you don't like posting music videos or cat pictures on the wolf web because if this legislation passes there will one day be no Wolf Web. Youtube, Facebook, and Google will be the first to go, its just another way to restrict and limit our choices for content by policing the internet.

This isn't about piracy though. The true intention of this legislation is to grant power to the corporate elite to silence ANY sort of dissent and that is why many of us see it as a threat to free speech. This legislation is designed to be used in this manner to maintain the current power structure and to squelch resistance.

^^ no, but those companies may have never gotten off the ground if they had tried to get started under this new act. the biggest problem with this act is that it assumes that the foreign website is automatically guilty and then assigns what amounts to punishment for it.

"^^ no, but those companies may have never gotten off the ground if they had tried to get started under this new act. the biggest problem with this act is that it assumes that the foreign website is automatically guilty and then assigns what amounts to punishment for it."

Won't this just move DNS resolution to offshore companies? China will love this. International competitors will love this. We are ceding control of the internet to appease a lobby group that has been dying because they refuse to innovate.

The harder whoever pushes against piracy, the quicker consumers will sidestep them. Congress shouldn't be in the business of protecting dying industries that are filled with middlemen who are angry that they are getting cut out.

no need to. youtube can fight the gov't far more now than it could have when it was just starting up. The MPAA wouldn't dare try to shut it down today, but it will issue C&D orders on specific videos, which is how it should be. Now imagine if all the MPAA had to do was just say "shut them down" when youtube was a baby? you don't think they would have done that back then if they had had the power to do so?

he United States government is not an exception in history, it is not any more immune to the greed of men than any government before it has been. Special interests can, do, and will subvert our laws at the people's expense when able. Allowing congress to chip away at our constitutionally affirmed liberties in "the war on terror" will not spare anyone from a Jihad. In fact, the more obvious Jihad waged now is one against human liberty, waged not by Islam, but elite of the Capitol beltway, and their anti-free-market friends on Wall Street who crave special protections, and tax payer subsidy. They buy their prosperity with your children's future. NDAA and SOPA are abominations, like the PATRIOT Act, they are no less an affront to our way of life than the attacks of September 11th. Republicans and Democrats alike are failing utterly, to stand for our founding principles, rather, they are disregarding them entirely for the most hollow justifications.

US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law

Quote :

"In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals."

"ABC and CBS are listed as supporters of the bill on the House Judiciary Committee website, along with Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), and Time Warner (CNN). Disney Publishing Worldwide, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, is also listed as a supporter, as are other Disney properties such as ESPN and Hyperion publishing...

...Despite all of this, the response from American television news outlets has been to almost completely ignore the story during their evening programming. The lone exception was a segment on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer in December, during which CNN parent company Time Warner's support for the legislation was not disclosed. (Though Fox News Channel has apparently not touched the story during evening programming, conservative/libertarian host Andrew Napolitano has run several segments vocally opposing SOPA on his program, which runs on the separate Fox Business Network.) "

"ReverseRobocall.com is the first and only company that allows citizens to send a Robocall of their own to one or hundreds of politicians and then share that message with the world. Not only will you have the satisfaction of delivering your message to dozens (or thousands) of people, but you can also share your robocall online with friends, family, blogs, the media, and the world!"

"Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws.

The indictment accuses the company of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. The indictment was unsealed Thursday, one day after websites shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted movies and TV programs.

Megaupload.com has claimed it is diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

The indictment says at one point, Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world."

[Edited on January 19, 2012 at 2:56 PM. Reason : we knew this, of course ]

"I wish there was this much attention on NDAA when that was being considered."

agreed.

However, the problem is that the people directly affected by SOPA are manyfold more than NDAA. While NDAA is wrong in so many ways, the reality is that the parts of it that strip citizens of habeas corpus weren't really made public until the 11th hour. And then ultimately few people are directly affected, and American apathy blah blah blah.

but you start fucking with people's lolcats, and there'll be a motherfucking American Spring.

"The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or H.R. 3523, just passed the U.S. House of Representatives after the day-long hearing. Originally expected to be debated on the floor of the House today for a vote tomorrow, the bill’s supporters decided to push the vote today and it went through with 248 to 168.""

H R 3523 RECORDED VOTE 26-Apr-2012 6:31 PM QUESTION: On Passage BILL TITLE: To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a self-protected entity may, for cybersecurity purposes — (i) use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such self-protected entity; and (ii) share such cyber threat information with any other entity, including the Federal Government…"

Renee Ellmers voted for it. And this takes precedence over any other law or legislation... some very well done analysis saying that this legislation is borderline in that it could very well mean that our 4th amendment rights are no longer guaranteed online.

In a rare public speech, the head of Britain's domestic spy service said Monday that the West now faces an "astonishing" cyber espionage threat on an "industrial scale" from specific nation states.

"The extent of what is going on is astonishing," said Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, "with industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state-sponsored cyber espionage and organized cyber crime."

Though Evans did not name any countries, ABC News has separately learned from sources that the U.K., the U.S. and several European allies have a robust discussion underway on how to counter cyber espionage by perhaps the most significant state operator -- China.